After a vegan blue cheese won the Good Food Award, panicked dairy cheese makers forced the foundation to disqualify it

MilitantVegan@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 798 points –
After a vegan blue cheese won the Good Food Award, panicked dairy cheese makers forced the foundation to disqualify it
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Really, the disqualification is probably better publicity than winning the award itself. If someone told me some vegan cheese won a "Good Food" award, I would assume it was related to eco- and social-consciousness. Learning that it was so delicious that the dairy industry schemed to take away the award tells me they're afraid of the competition.

When Seiko beat the Swiss at their own mechanical watch accuracy competitions, they decided to cancel the long running prestigious competition entirely instead of make a better watch.

Capitalism breeds innovation!

Misread as Sekiro, was confused about sword fighting and watches, but interested.

To be fair, a crystal clock is just going to be more accurate than a movement based watch. Even the biggest watch fanboys admit that a $30 Seiko Casio outperforms the majority of mechanicals on raw accuracy.

So... The existing market leader chose to flip the table instead of admitting that their position was weaker and lower value.

Yep, that sure sounds like the pursuit of capital instead of... innovation, quality, or any of the other attributes capitalism attempts to associate itself with.

The Neuchâtel Observatory is a publicly funded institution that certifies movements with high accuracy as chronometers. Not a private body, or a marketing tool used by a watchmaker. The same ‘competition’ is done by other observatories, all giving their own rating of a timepiece’s accuracy against a reference chronometer kept at the observatory.

A quick search could have brought you that information_ Quartz movements beat the pants off mechanical movements, and they’re far cheaper to make, allowing the non-rich to have a decent watch with good battery life and serious accuracy. Cheap and normal mechanical watches regularly drift and lose a few seconds time over days and weeks - quartz drifts between 1-110 seconds over a year.

They aren't talking about quartz watches though. Seiko makes mechanical watches that were being compared to swiss mechanical watches costing way more.

So funnily enough, the very first movement they submitted to the contest in 1963 was a quartz, and it placed tenth overall. They went with mechanical movements for subsequent competitions, and didn’t actually start placing high again until 1966 when they placed ninth overall. In ‘67 they did even better, placing fourth, but then the contest was canceled for good the next year.

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Indeed, and while they might have been initially furious at the snub, this is going to wind up being VERY good for business. Now they have an incredible story to tell, complete with mystery and intrigue that consumers love. Their marketing department must be salivating right now.

Right, first thing I thought when I read this is “where can I get some of that ‘cheese’”

Yeah, well, you can't. It's only available to restaurants, and isn't ready for retail. That's one of the stupid reasons they can't have their stupid award. Stupid sexy cheesish.

The username, the grumpy desire for vegan cheese. Perfect.

You're right, but it's understandable why the dairy industry shat themselves. They fucked up by allowing things to be named "oat milk" or "whatever milk", so they damn sure aren't going to let their "cheese" territory get encroached on.

The problem with restricting the use of the term "milk" is that people have been using the term "milk" to describe non-dairy liquids for longer than there have been trademarks. The word hasn't ever been used exclusively to describe dairy.

Here's a dictionary entry for "milk" from 1755:

https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/1755/milk_ns

Note that it includes almond and pistachio milks.

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